Everyone can afford a phone number. T-Mobile sells prepaid SIM cards with 100 minutes of airtime for $10. In fact, most prepaid providers sell refills as small as $10. You usually have at least three months to use them. Who cannot afford $3.33 a month for cell phone service?

That's not very bright—assuming you're this card's owner, and the info is correct. This info will now come up on a cursory Google search, and if your credit provider learns that you wilfully published this info, they'll close your account because you've violated the cardholder agreement. The law that provides for reimbursement of unauthorized charges does not extend to people shouting their credit card info from the rooftops and expecting a bailout later.

Wow, four of the five (thus far) replies to my post have said that Virgin is a branch of Sprint. So what? Boost is also! But each sets its own prices and policies. Sprint's postpaid is $80/mo for Everything Data. Virgin Mobile is $40/mo. Now tell me why I should care that Virgin is a Sprint subsidiary. Way to miss the forest for the trees.

I assume you're a fan of mobile data. Sprint is by far not the cheapest cellular provider. For cheapest, look into Virgin Mobile's $40/mo "unlimited" data and texting and T-Mobile's newest offering: "unlimited" 4G prepaid for $30/mo.

As far as I know there's no standard for fax encryption... how do you know if the remote side supports it?

(As an aside, the term "military-grade" is virtually meaningless. The military used (or uses?) DES.)

You don't understand economics.

No mention of Sprint in the article... I wonder who'll end up winning from this.

That's not cheating—that's being smart. When a user is typing his username and password, waiting for network authorization, and fetching the profile, 99.9999% of the time the PC would be idle. Why not use that time to load non-critical services?

Try making a site with more than two total users, then re-read what you just said. Of course, your site is so important and irreplaceable that your users will verify the fingerprint manually. To avoid the bootstrapping problem, maybe put your phone number into the certificate and they'll call you, read you the fingerprint, and you can confirm it for them. They won't mind at all.

I appreciate that you're trying to show how the free market is flawed and central planning is the way to go, but no one was "forced".

Source: CNet.

I know I'm in the minority, but I'd rather see an advertisement for low latency than high speed. Tethering my phone to my laptop and using SSH over Sprint's 3G is an experience I wish to avoid. (Ironically, 1RTTX seems to have lower latency than 3G.)

I've said it in the thread about cramming, I'll repeat it here: prepaid. I don't understand why Americans underappreciate prepaid, with such wonderful options like Virgin Mobile and Boost. I pay $25/mo (total) for unlimited (realistically 2.5 gigabytes/mo) data, unlimited SMS, and 300 minutes per month.

Here's a thread from earlier: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2254224&cid=36506886

When I pay $25 a month for a plan with 300 minutes, I am not paying for the minutes themselves -- I am buying an option that gives me 300 minutes—with an expiration date. Once the expiration is reached, I forfeit the remainder.

I bought this option while aware of its limitations. You did too. So did everyone else.

Calling it a fee seems disingenuous.

I think that's a stretch. This is not a fee, unless you redefine what fee means. Yes, you get a certain number of minutes per month without rollover. If you don't use them, you lose them. I've had months where I've used 299 out of 300 (and even 300 out of 300!) minutes when my billing cycle ended. I've also gone over, and paid 10 cents a minute.

To me, a fee (1) is poorly advertised, (2) should be included in the base price. The 911 government fee is an example. Better yet, the "administrative fee" that Sprint and Verizon charge to "help recoup costs associated with collecting other fees." Those are real fees. Losing my unused minutes is not a fee, IMHO.

What the hell are you going on about. That's not how Virgin Mobile works.